ANTIQUITY // AD 415

And whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken: but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder.

Matthew 21:4

+

In the 5th century AD, an ascetic monk wandered the Egyptian desert. St Sisoës, a student of St Anthony the Great, while in search for a solitary place to pray came instead to the tomb of the man who nearly 800 years prior shook the world. Alexander the Great, the Macadonian conquerer who overthrew the ancient Persian empire, lay before the monk an entombed corpse. St Sisoës is said to have been horrified by the grave of such a man, at the passing of time and the transient world dissolving to vapor. The saint's words would echo the spirit of Ecclesiastes:

Oh, death! Who can escape thee?

That the warrior king of Homeric scale could now appear before the humble monk as an emeciated corpse was enough to make St Sisoës marvel.

+

The king and the saint juxtapose the two worlds in which they lived; one in antiquity, the other in Christendom. For all their sophistication, philosophical prowess and various theatrical expressions of high culture, the Greeks could be considered no less than cruel. Unwanted children were left exposed to be taken by nature, the poor were despised, slaves were kept and abused as their master pleased- some even brutally executed in a public display of strength. The ancients valued strength over weakness, courage over compassion, Greeks over barbarians, and men over women.

+

Christendom however was a world transfigured. "Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth" was as prophetic as it was prescriptive; St Sisoës was proof. The self sacrifice that the saint performed in his ascetic struggle would have been, to Alexander, met with pitiful contempt and perhaps marvel as well, that the weak could shame the strong. Between these two worlds stands Christ, parting the old from the new like the prophet once parted the sea. In Christ, meekness prevailed over strength, leaving the world of antiquity forever dead in His empty tomb.